Fourteen years ago, Chris Clark shelled out 20 bucks to register the domain name "pizza.com." This afternoon, he's selling it to the highest bidder for somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million.
"It's crazy, it's just crazy," he said somewhat giddily yesterday morning from his home in North Potomac. By then, a week's worth of anonymous bidding at an online auction site had pushed the price to $2.6 million. The auction closes at 2 p.m. today.
"That amount of money is significant," said Clark, 43, who recently launched a software company. "It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure."
With more than 150 million domain names already listed with registry firms, coming up with unused -- and uncomplicated -- Web addresses is close to impossible. That's led to an active secondary sales market, where domain owners try reselling their Web names to big corporate spenders.
Most domains resell for about $2,000, domain traders say. But the premium names -- the generic ones that cover an entire industry and end in the all-important ".com" -- can draw millions.
Business.com sold for $7.5 million in 1999, and so did diamond.com seven years later, according to an industry trade magazine. In 2006, a Russian alcohol exporter bought vodka.com for $3 million, while sex.com sold for about $12 million in cash and stock. Last month, fund.com sold for $10 million.
The best generic names -- those like books.com (owned by Barnes & Noble) and pets.com (PetSmart) -- were snapped up long ago during the early 1990s, back when the World Wide Web was still relatively shiny and new.
Such names are popular because they naturally draw Web traffic. An Illinois T-shirt company, for example, recently paid $225,000 to buy tees.com after executives learned that the site was getting 17,000 hits a month -- mostly by people who typed in the address out of curiosity.
Generic names also boost their owners' search engine rankings on the Web. That's because the domain names often match keywords used to search, said Catherine Pancake, director of account services at Web Ad.vantage Inc., an Internet marketing firm based in Havre de Grace.
"It would be great to have `pizza' as a domain name," she said. "It will be recognized highly by Google as being relevant to pizza."
